Hands on with Ubuntu for smartphones

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There’s a big difference between releasing a video with smooth, sexy animation and actually being able to deliver that experience in the real world. Ubuntu for Smartphones may be pretty late to the smartphone ecosystem, but spending any time with the mobile operating system shows that Canonical has been paying attention.

We’ve been hearing about Canonical getting into the mobile space for a while now. It seemed like Ubuntu for Android was as far as that was going to go for a bit, but now we have the entire Ubuntu experience in a mobile phone. The operating system is just called Ubuntu, allowing the company to complete their illusion that this operating system offers everything that desktop Ubuntu runs. There are more than a couple of differences at the moment, but if you’re a fan of the Unity UI you will find yourself right at home with this interface. Every bit of Ubuntu on the Galaxy Nexus, the phone of choice for the demonstration, has visual cues that come straight from Unity, but the mobile OS will be optimized for any and all displays it will be installed for.

Everything about Ubuntu is incredibly smooth. The animations looked great, and the phone felt incredibly fast considering the hardware it was running on. There are no versions of Android that feel this smooth and have animations this nice on the Galaxy Nexus. Ubuntu makes the Galaxy Nexus feel as though it could compete with the Nexus 4 or the Droid DNA. Also, it’s clear Ubuntu seems to have succeed in an area that took Android years to figure out, and did it with less hardware. Even the parts of the mobile OS that feel as though they might be borrowed from Android are greatly improved upon in Ubuntu.

Android’s notification shade is easily one of my favorite things about the platform. To be able to quickly access my notifications and dismiss them with a swipe is a powerful tool. Ubuntu has taken the notification shade and improved it dramatically. The top bar of the OS has several icons across it, offering a quick glimpse into things like battery life and of course your messages. When you pull the notification shade down, if you place your finger on one of these icons before you pull, you are shown settings relevant to that icon. If you want to take a closer look at your battery life or adjust your volume controls, you can do so without ever leaving whatever app you are in.

Settings for every app are available by swiping up from the bottom of the screen, in a gesture that is quite similar to the right-to-left flick gesture used in Windows 8 to access the menu. If you swipe from right-to-left in Ubuntu, you are taken to the last app you were using. Repeat swipes will continue to take you back in time until you have exhausted the list of apps. There’s also a swipe to access launcher with apps that the user determines. The app drawer itself is separate from this, choosing instead to organize by frequency of use followed by the rest of the apps. Web apps and native apps are indistinguishable on any menu, meaning the Facebook icon will take you to their web app.

Ubuntu is far from perfect. Their welcome screen allows for way too many apps to be rapidly accessible without a pin lock of some kind. While many users may prefer the wide open access to apps without the restrictive lock screen, being able to stay protected from that one friend you have is important as well. Ubuntu plans to have this feature available before launch. Also, despite Canonical’s best attempts to persuade you to believe that web apps are “first class citizens”, Gmail.com is never going to give your Ubuntu phone a notification when you get an email. Native apps for certain things are still necessary for now, and Ubuntu will need developers to fill their stores quickly.

For an operating system that doesn’t have its own hardware yet, Ubuntu is really impressive. In order to be successful at launch, however, the seemingly small issues mentioned above will need to be worked out and developers need to feel comfortable moving to this platforme.

While I am not willing to put my Android phone down just yet, I am very curious to see where Ubuntu will land when finally released on its own hardware.